HealthMap

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

HealthMap is a freely accessible, automated electronic information system for monitoring, organizing and visualizing reports on global disease outbreaks by geography, time and infectious agents.

It has been in operation at Boston Children's Hospital since September 2006 and was developed by John Brownstein, a Canadian epidemiologist and professor in the medical school at Harvard University and Clark Freifeld.

HealthMap collects data from a variety of freely accessible electronic media sources (e.g. ProMED-mail, Eurosurveillance , Wildlife Disease Information Node, Google News , World Health Organization (WHO), GeoSentinel) in order to provide a comprehensive overview of the current, global status of infectious diseases receive.

HealthMap users come from a variety of organizations including state and local health authorities, the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control ( ECDC ) . HealthMap is used both as an early warning system and as a hazard assessment aid by providing up-to-date, very local information on outbreaks, even from areas relatively invisible to traditional global public health efforts.

In October 2008, the project received a grant of 3 million US dollars from Google.org .

HealthMap's first major success came during the H1N1 2009/10 (swine flu) pandemic , when the program used sources such as Spanish-language online news reports to identify early-stage unidentified respiratory disease in Veracruz , Mexico . Five years later, she tapped the WHO Twitter feed and other sources to follow the spread of the Ebola virus in near real time.

HealthMap currently monitors information from over 20,000 websites in English, Chinese, Spanish, Russian, French, Portuguese and Arabic in a fully automated manner, collecting an average of 300 reports per day, 85% of which come from news media sources. The application itself is based on Linux , Apache , MySQL - database and a PHP appliqué.

In the meantime, the project has published applications called "Outbreaks Near Me" intended for the Apple iPhone .

In March 2014, Healthmap software tracked early press and social media reports of a hemorrhagic fever in West Africa that was later identified as Ebola by the WHO . The HealthMap team then created a special visualization of the sources of infection at healthmap.org/ebola.

As early as December 2019, HealthMap recorded a noticeable accumulation of pneumonia in the Wuhan area , the presumed place of origin of the subsequent coronavirus pandemic .

In March 2020, Healthmap published the website "Covidnearyou", on which Americans can voluntarily report whether or not they are affected by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ HealthMap. Accessed April 10, 2020 (English).
  2. ↑ Alexis Madrigal: Researchers Track Disease With Google News, Google.org Money . In: Wired . July 7, 2008, ISSN  1059-1028 ( wired.com [accessed April 11, 2020]).
  3. ↑ HealthMap. Accessed April 10, 2020 (English).
  4. ↑ Google.org Battles Bugs & Viruses - News announcements - News from Google - Google. Retrieved April 11, 2020 : "Children's Hospital Corporation supporting Healthmap and ProMED-mail - $ 3M multi-year grant to combine HealthMap's digital detection efforts with ProMED-mail's global network of human, animal, and ecosystem health specialists. Together, these programs will assess current emerging disease reporting systems, expand regional networks in Africa and Southeast Asia, and develop new tools to improve the detection and reporting of outbreaks. "
  5. ↑ Katherine Ellison, Knowable Magazine: Social Media Posts and Online Searches Hold Vital Clues about Pandemic Spread. Retrieved on April 11, 2020 : “HealthMap's first big success came during the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic, when it used sources that included Spanish-language online news reports to aid in early detection of an unidentified respiratory illness in Veracruz , Mexico. "
  6. ↑ Roxanne Nelson: HealthMap: the future of infectious diseases surveillance? In: The Lancet Infectious Diseases . tape 8 , no. 10 , October 1, 2008, ISSN  1473-3099 , p. 596 , doi : 10.1016 / S1473-3099 (08) 70219-6 ( thelancet.com [accessed April 10, 2020]): "The system has expanded substantially since its inception, and currently collates information from over 20000 websites. An average of 300 reports are collected each day, with 85% acquired from news media sources. "
  7. ↑ Alexis Madrigal: iPhone App Finds Disease Outbreaks Near You . In: Wired . September 1, 2009, ISSN  1059-1028 ( wired.com [accessed April 10, 2020]).
  8. ↑ HealthMap: Outbreaks Near Me. Retrieved April 10, 2020 (American English).
  9. ↑ Viral Pneumonia Infects Almost 60 in Central China | HealthMap. Retrieved April 10, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Coronavirus Researchers Are Using High-Tech Methods to Predict Where the Virus Might Go Next. Accessed April 10, 2020 (English).
  11. ↑ Early detection of epidemics: artificial intelligence alone is not enough. Retrieved April 10, 2020 (German): “The automated HealthMap system at the Children's Hospital in Boston reported that there were cases of unknown pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The system, which scans online messages and reports on social media, only gave the incident priority three on an ascending scale to five. "